A Right to Prostitute Others? Amnesty International and the Privileging of the Male Orgasm

The typical liberal defence of prostitution, based on the idea of an individual woman's "human right" to "sell herself" for monetary gain, has popularly circulated in Western countries for more than three decades.

In recent years, it has spawned a further defence of prostitution, this time on the side of the buyer and the "right" to sex. Men who buy women in prostitution have become constructed as legitimate sexual consumers, and as rational choice decision-makers perusing their individual "free expression and health."

This defence of prostitution has arisen specifically in opposition to the "Nordic Model" of prostitution policy. Since 1999, a number of countries have legislated against the buying of people for prostitution. Sweden, Norway, Iceland, South Korea, Canada, Ireland and Northern Ireland have all criminalized the activities of prostitution buyers.

The Nordic Model policy to criminalize the sex industry and its customers, but decriminalize people in prostitution, is supported by the European Union and Council of Europe, and is advocated by Equality Now and the European Women's Lobby.

In April 2012, AI commenced a review of its policy platform on prostitution. The UK branch was particularly active in seeking a revision of this stance towards a more proactive endorsement of the "rights" of sex industry participants, including buyers.

After undertaking a review in 2013, AI's London-based secretariat released a number of policy background documents in which prostituting others is described as an exercise of "personal autonomy," and government policy criminalizing the purchase of sexual services - the centrepiece of the Nordic Model - is condemned as state suppression of individual autonomy and health, as follows:

"Men and women who buy sex from consenting adults are also exercising personal autonomy ... Some develop a stronger sense of self in their relationships with sex workers, improving their life enjoyment and dignity. At a very basic level, expressions of sexuality and sex are a primary component of the human experience, which is directly linked to individuals' physical and mental health. The state's interference with an adult's strategy to have sex with another consenting adult is, therefore, a deliberate interference with those individuals' autonomy and health."

The AI secretariat retrospectively explained that it released the documents to initiate a "global consultation process" on the issue of "prostitution and human rights," but the documents pre-emptively put beyond question the possibility that AI members might support the criminalisation of prostitution buyers.

A number of radical feminists responded to the AI defence of prostitution buyers. Julie Bindel writes: "By definition, men who are willing to pay for sex already have a contemptuous attitude towards women - they are not interested in an equal relationship, or a meaningful exchange with a partner."

Kathleen Barry further comments on AI's inconsistency in recognising the irrelevance of female consent in its well-known violence against women campaigns addressing problems such as domestic violence, but then insisting on consent as the arbiter of the harm (or lack thereof) in relation to the actions of prostitution buyers. Barry alternatively recommends a more fundamental "human rights" approach to prostitution that recognises the buying of human beings for sexual use as a form of violence, irrespective of considerations of victim "consent" to the behaviour:

"[F]or once and for all, let us remove the issue of the victim's consent in every case of sexual crimes. In calling for new human rights law to make prostitution a violation of human rights, we are displacing the misogynist paradigm with a human rights one."

Further critique of Amnesty's defence of buyers came from prostitution survivor organisations in the United States, Canada and the UK, which have mobilised in recent years to campaign against the sex industry and advocate for worldwide adoption of the Nordic Model.

These organisations are comprised of publicly declared victims of sex industry exploitation, and have become a significant force opposing the "sex worker rights" organisations that formed in the 1990s to support full sex industry decriminalisation. They include SPACE International (Survivors of Prostitution-Abuse Calling for Enlightenment) and Sex Trafficking Survivors United, which together co-ordinated an online petition against the Amnesty proposal.

The mobilisation of survivors internationally since the turn of the twenty-first century had already brought a quantum shift in campaigning for the Nordic Model, and the movement responded swiftly and effectively to the Amnesty proposal. As a result, AI has attracted notable condemnation on social media for making the protection of the male orgasm a greater priority than the protection of women's rights.